I got tagged in discussion about the origin of zaps by @dk. It reminded me of all the instances of zaps that I was made aware of after starting SN.
The earliest instance, as far as I know, dates back to 2011 with a site called WitCoin which used custodial onchain bitcoin for zaps and fees. I learned about it from this comment by @cointastical:
Did you know?
Long before Stacker.News, there was Witcoin. Back when BTC/USD was under $1.
Witcoin UI was pretty basic, but along the same lines as SN (pay in BTC to post, to comment, to upvote, etc, and the OP got most of the payment for upvotes and comments, and the site got its cut).
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Witcoin
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2516.0
tl;dr: Custodial wallet. Eventually abandoned and outstanding balances rugged.
Oh, very nice, never heard of witcoin. So it was very short lived. Why was that?
It was too early.
The size of the bitcoin "community" was a miniscule fraction of it today, which itself is a miniscule fraction of the broader Q&A/Link sharing social media landscape (from which Reddit, Stack Overflow, etc. are frequented by).
Also, early bitcoiners were not fond of dropping 0.01 BTC (~$0.01) just to reply to a post, for example.
The two founders, an ideas guy and a dev, kind of clashed if I remember correctly. If I remember correctly the dev was open to shitcoinery. And then the dev had a number of issues with his personal life. Witcoin stagnated and before completely wilting away, was hacked, and shuttered.
In other words, Witcoin did not have a K00b -- not even close.
All that, but especially:
Thanks, very interesting../
Many of us say SN is early and WitCoin was 10 years early-er.
Indeed, and surprisingly soon after Bitcoin was born.
Good old days. Free faucet giving out . 05 btc
Times were simpler back thenā¦
canāt keep a good idea down! ā”ļø
Vitalik also interviewed the founder of another bitcoin using social media platform called UpTweet in 2012.
Thatās a fun fact.
Do I still get a prize @grayruby?
You will have to add to the fun fact friday post and take your chances.
So, you got this idea from 'witcoin'?
I wasnāt aware of witcoin as I said in one of those links.
I have come to this field quite late. So I hadn't heard about it.
Most people hadnāt. @cointastical is the only person thatās ever brought it up
Today I will try to know a little more about it.
I remember large faucets....but I never saved the coins.